Road barriers aim for safer streets in Detroit neighborhood

Jul. 21, 2013

Masons work on a road barrier on Woodward Avenue north of 7 Mile in Detroit, one of eight new barriers in the Palmer Woods area that residents and city officials said are aimed at stopping speeders from cutting through the upscale neighborhood. Critics have long opposed traffic barriers in Detroit, calling them elitist and even racist. / Bill Laitner/Detroit Free Press

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Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

This concrete barricade will block an entrance into the Palmer Woods neighborhood at 7 Mile and Lincolnshire. The barriers have gotten mixed reactions from residents. / Jarrad Henderson/Detroit Free Press

One of eight newly built traffic barriers in Detroit's Palmer Woods area, designed to keep drivers from using the streets in the upscale neighborhood as shortcuts between 7 Mile and Woodward. This barrier is called a diverter because it doesn't fully block traffic but does force motorists to turn. / Bill Laitner/DFP

Over the years, efforts to wall off Detroit streets to keep out motorists have drawn howls, with critics charging elitism and racism.

Today, Detroit not only is welcoming the efforts, the cash-strapped city footed the bill.

Northwest Detroit’s upscale Palmer Woods neighborhood, known for its tudor mansions and streets bordered by landscape rocks instead of curbs, has installed traffic barriers to block speeders from cutting through the historic area.

Two traffic barriers were finished this month on Woodward, and several more on 7 Mile Road. One barrier on 7 Mile allows cars to exit but not enter the residential streets; other barriers will block all traffic except bicycles. In addition, within Palmer Woods, four traffic diverters that force drivers to turn were built at intersections to block straightaways favored by speeders, neighborhood leaders said.

The City of Detroit paid for “the first $300,000” of the Palmer Woods project, said Karla Henderson, the city’s group executive for planning and facilities.

“We felt this project was a win-win, to improve a stable neighborhood with a strong tax base and not have residents leave the city, frankly,” she said. Henderson said the city’s portion of the project is being funded by “leftover bond money” that couldn’t be spent on anything but roads.

The community held fund-raisers to pay for designs and testing of the barriers and diverters, and the residents also paid to have the barriers landscaped, she added.

Palmer Woods joins a growing number of neighborhoods and communities looking to limit motorists’ access by blocking off streets.

At Detroit’s border on the east side, Grosse Pointe Park officials hope to build an office and retail development that would extend into Kercheval, curtailing traffic to create a walkable entertainment district on the suburban side of the avenue.

And last month, members of the volunteer security committee in Detroit’s upscale Indian Village area heard a resident ask that streets be blocked off from adjoining neighborhoods, said Michael Strizich, president of the Historic Indian Village Association. It was the latest request in years of such discussions, Strizich said.

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“There’s always been quite a mixed feeling about it,” he said. “Some feel it would be wrong to cut ourselves off from the rest of the city, and others would like to close off every street except Jefferson” — the south boundary of Indian Village.

Terms like “gated community” and “traffic barricade” can evoke bitter memories of Detroit’s former racial divides. In six years of planning, Palmer Woods leaders took pains to call their effort “traffic calming,” not aimed at keeping out crime or undesirable motorists.

“These are not barricades,” declared Craig Vanderburg, president of the Palmer Woods Association, a business consultant who volunteers his time to head a tight-knit group that represents Palmer Woods’ 289 homes. The association sponsors house tours, community concerts, snowplowing and 24-hour roving guards, using annual dues that typically cost $500 per home, he said.

“We used to have people coming through at 50 m.p.h., running all the stop signs,” Vanderburg said, but ever since construction started in late spring, “we’ve had joggers out jogging, bicyclists out bicycling, when you didn’t before.”

Not everyone is happy about it.

Detroiter T.J. Hopkins says he found himself stuck at the Woodward barricade, cutting through Palmer Woods between Woodward and 7 Mile in his green Land Rover on his way home from the grocery store on a recent afternoon.

“They don’t have any signs saying it’s cut off,” said Hopkins, who compared the barricades to the man-made seclusion created in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood when that area was gated in the 1960s and ’70s.

Palmer Woods resident Steve Breinager, who has lived on Afton Street for five years, says he thinks gating the neighborhood would be more effective in combating crime and addressing traffic issues.

“That would have done a lot more,” Breinager said. The new barricades force all traffic heading down Wellesley toward Woodward to go past his house.

Still, many residents like the changes. Mary Anne Helveston, a Palmer Woods resident since 1979, said she and her husband live a stone’s throw from a new traffic diverter.

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“Years ago, people were talking about closing off the streets, and some people said it was a bad idea. It would be too elitist. But we have 4- and 9-year-old granddaughters at our house often, and I don’t worry anymore” about cars speeding near the children, Helveston said.

Grosse Pointe Park officials hope developers will follow through with plans to erect a unique traffic barrier — a 20,000-square-foot medical-office building, to have retailers on the first floor, on Kercheval Avenue at the suburb’s border with Detroit.

Initial designs had the building straddling Kercheval, blocking all traffic. But the latest design, approved by the Grosse Pointe Park Planning Commission, has the building sticking out into Kercheval, yet allowing limited traffic, slowed by a circular sculpture in the middle of the street, said Mayor Pro Tem Greg Theokas.

“It would be in the middle of the block between Alter and Wayburn,” Theokas said.

“We already have several restaurants along there, and there’s an old church that’s about to become a microbrewery. By closing off the street, we could really turn this into an amazing entertainment district,” he said. No date has been set for starting construction, he said.

Grosse Pointe Park officials defend the plan by saying that Detroit set a precedent for blocking Kercheval years ago when it let auto executives terminate Kercheval at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Asembly Plant, opened in 1991 to build the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The office building protruding into Kercheval would let Grosse Pointe Park quickly close Kercheval to traffic at night, creating a walkable plaza to attract “young professionals who want this kind of atmosphere,” City Attorney Dennis Levasseur said.

Detroit officials said they’ve long been aware of plans for Palmer Woods’ barriers and approved them after meetings that included police and fire department representatives.

But several Detroit officials said Grosse Pointe Park had not informed them of the Kercheval plan.

Grosse Pointe Park leaders said they don’t need Detroit’s approval.

“We don’t have to get permission from anybody,” Mayor Palmer Heenan said.